Voices from the margins

A fellow Chronicle blogger tweeted, “Universe nudging me toward more risk, less fear recently. What are you being called toward? My answer coincides with the headlines that are swimming this week of marginalized people. From Herman Cain’s underplaying of harassment allegations to Penn State’s decades long sex abuse coverup to an area teen’s death by suicide this week, we haven’t figured out how to listen to the voices on the margins.

Jesus in the Margins: from, http://abranchinthevine.blogspot.com/2011/01/least-of-these.html

Here are several of those voices from this week’s blog roundup.

Julie Clawson is an excellent blogger from Austin and author of Everyday Justice. Her most recent blog speaks to our natural ability to trivialize and even demonize “the other” by placing them on the margins. We not only ignore these other voices, we pretend they are no different from us. She says

“The urge to question the validity of the identity of the other remains strong. Instead of scorning the culture of the other however, it is now the very idea of culture and identity that gets scorned. In an age of identity politics where the voices from the margins are finally emerging as valid conversation partners, the latest redefining trend is to deny the very idea of identity. “It’s not that you are inferior it is just that you are not actually who you think you are. Gay, female, black? – those are meaningless categories, so therefore there’s no need to argue about the need to listen to something that doesn’t actually exist.”

Once again the other is being redefined as being nowhere.

But, as my six year old so astutely pointed out, it isn’t nowhere to them.

In A Woman’s Plea for Peace “ordinary” mom Jenny Rae Armstrong says “Enough!” to violence and war that predominantly effects woman. A survivor of war in Liberia, her account (a relatively ‘mild’ one) is staggering: “War is not an abstract concept. War is blankets duct-taped over the windows, shielding the eyes from what the ears cannot keep out. War is your father fidgeting worriedly with the static-y radio, your mother assuring you that they would have to climb over her dead body to take you away.” What’s truly harrowing is her account of war from the perspective of woman. She says,

Women’s experiences in war are, and always have been, especially horrifying. The violence done on the battlefield is brutal, but the atrocities that take place in the rubble of homes, in the back alleys and side streets of war-torn cities, are particularly grotesque. Stories of gang rape, enslavement and sadistic sexual torture are commonplace, cruel arrows aimed at killing a woman’s soul while keeping her body available for the conqueror’s consumption.

Where is God when a woman is being raped with a rifle, when she is asked which breast she would prefer to have cut off, when she is being slaughtered like an animal while her helpless children scream? I believe in a loving, benevolent God, and the only way I can begin to make sense of it is to remember the Son, stripped naked, flogged and pinned to the cross, like a tortured daughter pinned to the broken concrete.

Another voice who too often feels Caught in the Margins is Anarchist Reverend. About his feeling of marginalization he says, “It’s really frustrating and often leaves me feeling mighty lonely.” Lonely as an anarchist, as a Christian, and as queer; each one seemingly ostracizing him in some important way from those who are “in”. In Queer People Should Keep Silent he talks powerfully about why precisely they should not:

My first critique to this response is that we don’t ask other people to be silent about their identities when we find their identities acceptable. We don’t ask mothers to not talk about their children, or people to not talk about their work. We don’t tell them that their love of baseball doesn’t belong as a sermon analogy. We don’t ask people not to talk about their spouses or the ethnic identity of their family (so long as that ethnic identity is something that won’t “challenge” our own ethnic identity). But these identities are socially acceptable in most cases. These identities don’t carry with them the threat of violence.

He closes “Margins” saying, “I am willing to be in the margins, I just want someone walking there with me.”

Which, as it turns out, is really more true than most of us care to admit. Andy Alexis-Baker suggests we’re already on the margins. In The Myth of the State as Savior and Elections as Confessions of Faith he outlines how the American political system is at its core an elitist (and therefore exclusive) system bent on status quo limiting of the people’s power. He quotes John Howard Yoder, the pre-eminent Mennonite theologian, saying, “We are still governed by an elite, most of whose decisions are not submitted to the people for approval… The consent of the governed, the built-in controls of constitutionality, checks and balances, and the bill of rights do not constitute the fact of government they only mitigate it.”

This reminds me of The Hunger Games, where the states power is always lauded as benevolent, yet experienced as menacing. Alexis-Baker challenges the story most of us live into:

Through schools, media and in countless fragmentary ways we learn a foundational narrative that situates elections: the state saves people from violence and tyranny. In the United States, grade school students learn stories of revolution and territorial expansion from textbooks, classroom discussions and “fun” films like the School House Rocks cartoon shorts. Students eventually acquire a theoretical framework for this story from classical political theorists like Hobbes, Rousseau and John Locke.

Finally, this week I was deeply heartened to see Mennonite Church USA Responds to Palestinian Christians appeal. Several years ago the leaders of the Palestinian church asked world Christians to “stand against injustice and apartheid, urging them to work for a just peace in our region, calling on them to revisit theologies that justify crimes perpetrated against our people and the dispossession of the land.” Annette Brill Bergstresser recounts how the denomination responded, by “committing to expand opportunities for Mennonite leaders to visit Palestine and learn firsthand about the suffering there. They also wrote a letter to members of Mennonite Church USA, asking them to read and discuss the Kairos document, to study Scriptures together on the matter and to consider how their financial lives may be enmeshed in the occupation of Israel.” The letter written “acknowledges the ongoing reality of the suffering described in the Palestinians’ letter and their persistence in clinging to hope and love.” It stated:

“We are humbled and grateful for the way, even in your situation, you trust in the power of love as modeled and inspired by Jesus Christ. We are deeply moved by your testimony that even in the midst of cruel circumstances, you bear the strength of love rather than that of revenge. We are inspired by your continued vision that the only way forward is for Palestinians and Israelis to see the face of God in each other… This is a region with much hurt and pain,” he writes. “In part what is needed is careful listening to the pain and trauma experienced by the Jewish people. These horrors were often committed by those who claimed Christian faith. Ongoing reflection and repentance is called for. At the same time, Palestinians suffer deep and profound loss and pain. Their cries, too, have reached us.”

“The suffering in this region has repercussions for the whole world,” says André Gingerich Stoner, director of holistic witness and interchurch relations for Mennonite Church USA. “We want to hear deeply the cry of our brothers and sisters and to join them in being a sign of the healing and hope that Jesus brings.”